Story Of A Cracked Pot And How Our Mistakes Helps Us Progress

No one is perfect, people say, and we say it about ourselves. There is no such thing as a perfect person and everyone admits it. We often don't even know why we are not perfect, what our faults are or what makes us imperfect. If however we do know, we should not lie to ourselves, we should not be ashamed, we should not try to hide it and perhaps most importantly, we should own up to our own mistakes.

I know a short story about the water carrier and the earthenware pots, which have a perfect and a cracked earthenware pot. The cracked pot knows itself to be cracked and cannot fully perform its everyday function. So, ashamed, it confesses its fault to the water carrier, whereupon the water carrier tells it, that he knows of its fault, yet he has not fixed or replaced it because it benefits him.

Story Of A Cracked Pot

"In China, a water carrier had two large earthenware pots. They hung on the end of the stick he carried around his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other was perfect and always carried a full ration of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot was only half full of water. This went on for two whole years: the water carrier only delivered one and a half pots of water to the house.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its performance, as it had done its job well. But the poor broken pot was ashamed of its imperfection and miserable that it could only do half as much. One day, after two years of bitterness, he called the water carrier by the stream:

- I'm ashamed, because the water leaks all the way home.

The water carrier replied to the pot:

- Have you noticed, that flowers grow only on your side of the path and not on the other side of the pot? That's because, I always knew about your mistake and scattered flower seeds on this side of the path. I've been picking these beautiful flowers to decorate the table for two years. If you weren't who you are, this beauty wouldn't light up my house."

This story inspired me to talk about not being ashamed of our mistakes and to acknowledge and recognize them. If you do anything or even ignore the mistakes you make at work or your own mistakes because you don't even realize they exist, they will show up and make you uncomfortable where you don't even think they exist.

Let's Acknowledge Our Mistakes And Our Weaknesses

We simply cannot hide the fact, that we are not as good at something as our fellow human beings. They will notice, no matter how much we try to hide or conceal it. If we don't admit, that we have flaws, we are just digging a hole under ourselves and after a while it will be difficult to get out of it.

Look At Our Mistakes As Stages Of Progress

Dare to make mistakes and make mistakes we must. If you don't do anything, don't work, don't try something new and unknown, you don't make mistakes. If our ideas and attempts fail, at least we have gained new experiences. If, for example, someone comes up with something radically new at work, that could help the company or colleagues move forward, they might even get a promotion for their efforts, and it doesn't matter how the idea went.

Let's Find Out What's Wrong

Don't let our mistakes pass us by. Let's recognize what our mistakes are and examine where they come from and what their causes are. Let's not blame ourselves, however, once we have noticed and know what our mistakes are, practicing self-criticism on ourselves will give us a clearer vision and we will start to pay more attention to ourselves and our environment.

How do you feel when you fail at a simple task. A task that others can easily do in a minute almost without thinking? When you are shown the solution, you realize how simple it is, but you fail to figure out why you couldn't solve it.

It's because you really wanted to solve it and were striving for perfection. You didn't want to make mistakes. The solution was right in front of you, but you didn't see it, because you didn't think outside the box, because you thought, that would be a mistake. Nobody likes to make mistakes.

If you have had a situation in your life where you couldn't solve a simple task, now would be a good time to recall it or think about how you feel, what you say to yourself in such a situation. Most likely, how stupid I am. Or that, it's not my fault, I'm just in a bad mood today. Or that, I don't want anyone to know I was thinking the wrong thing.

Watch your thoughts, because you can even have thoughts, that create a circumstance around you, where you explain to yourself, that you don't know how to do this, you don't want to do it, you see the task as meaningless, there is no point.

By recognizing and acknowledging our mistakes we can make a huge step forward, because it will definitely help us in self-improvement. After each mistake we make we learn from our mistakes and next time we know, what not to do and how not to do it, of course this does not mean, that we should now strive to make as many mistakes as possible, to pile up mistake after mistake.